Thursday, November 20, 2003

Packed house tonight. This is going to be something, a beta group for a new software product at a university that meets once a week. Even in the old days, in the 80s, I never had so much contact with users. Off to a great start. BTW, I'd love to read other people's accounts of tonight's meeting. 

My talk at Stanford Law School is at 12:30PM on Monday. Open to the public. Depending on how it goes tonight, I may demo the new authoring system I'm working on.  

Bill Joy: "Open source doesn't assist the initial creative act." 

My demo list for this evening's meeting. 

Chris Sells explains how Longhorn SDK annotations work.  

Dave Pollard: "I'm just trying to save the world. Someone else will have to save the blogosphere." 

Jon Udell: Working with Bayesian Categorizers. 

Fascinating map shows where each of the candidates' money comes from. 

Just the barest hint of a clue over in Jack Valenti Land. Hey Jack, people are watching first-run movies on the Internet right now. But, this is a good sign, the entertainment industry is trying to market to customers, selling a benefit. But there's no benefit to copy protection, not for people who use the stuff, in fact it's a negative feature. Yeah I know the rationales, been there done that, went to Comdex, but in the end the customers aren't that stupid. 

BTW, I know I'm really rude when it comes to talking about entertainment industry execs. No, I wouldn't like it if people talked about me that way in public. When I read someone saying Dave Winer has the barest hint of a clue, I think, yeah sure, what makes him so smart. Okay, I need to express my inner-arrogance. Many apologies to Jack Valenti, who surely is a fine human being, for using him as my foil. No kidding. 

Now, on the other hand, Jack dreams of modifying our operating systems, hard drives, networks, routers, servers, you name it -- so that he can tell us which bits we can copy. This rewrite makes the Y2K corner-turn look tiny in comparison. The cost is incomprehensible. Does that make him an asshole? You bet. 

Five years ago today: "How much thinking goes on on the Internet?" 

Michael Feldman's tutorial is a great resource for people learning how to use Manila. 

It's really great to see O'Reilly embrace RSS 2.0. The power of two growing platforms, Microsoft's Longhorn and Really Simple Syndication.  

Tim Bray: "Jean Paoli called last week to tip me off about the release of the MS Office XML schema-ware." 

I just noticed that Al Gore looks a lot like Robert Scoble. 

Yesterday I met someone who had not read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I expressed envy. I wish I had not read it so I could read it again for the first time. A delicious book. Then it occurred to me that some of you might not have read it either. You have no excuse now.  

Here's the NY Times review, published in 1969. The book came up in conversation because it offers a reasonable and highly optimistic view of existence. No one is actually dead, they're just reliving the important moments of their lives, maybe the not-so-important ones too. A philosophy that suggests that you should pack life with lots of interesting moments because you're going to be experiencing them for eternity. In this view, deja vu is a little leakage in the matrix (as it is in The Matrix).